24 November 2018 10:00 AM

Saturday PS: Still amazing after all these years

I have long suspected that, were the consumer society to rely solely on people like me, it would collapse. Someone who pays no attention to advertisements, reads precisely none of those puff pieces in the media about “exciting” (they aren’t) new trends, chucks away those absurd supplements advertising wristwatches that cost more than the average house, and whose main retail focus is on second-hand bookshops and the off licence is hardly going to keep the wheels of capitalism spinning.

The root of the problem is that I still think a lot of everyday items are really rather spiffy. Consumerism relies on novelty wearing off, of people taking for granted what was recently sought after and of one generation’s luxuries becoming the next generation’s necessities.

Not me. Here’s a few of the features of modern life that I still think are pretty darned amazing.

All services that are constantly available, that have no “closing times” and require little effort to access. Gas, water and electricity, obviously, and the house phone, sitting patiently at the end of a bit of wire 24 hours a day, not to mention the mobile, tirelessly scanning the airwaves for calls and texts and available for outgoing communication at the press of a few buttons.

Stereo sound. My first transistor radio was mono, obviously, but had a “second grille” on the back, presumably for ventilation, and I would try to kid myself that this made it sort-of stereo (it didn’t). I have loved stereo ever since, not just the sound but the idea of it. And how do they manage to broadcast radio programmes in stereo? It’s brilliant.

Household devices that can be switched to automatic. Whether it’s the timer on the central heating and the hot water or the pre-set facility on the oven, I rather like the idea that, if we want, we can put important parts of house on auto-pilot and things will then switch on and off by themselves.

Fridges and freezers. Not just in terms of keeping food fresh, but also, on a simpler level, the quiet pleasure to be had from being able to drink chilled water, beer or anything else whenever you feel like it. We even have a spare (small) fridge in the garage, for Christmas and other events, and – the height of self-indulgence – a small fridge that can be fitted into the back of my wife’s estate car.

E-mail. Universal, almost instant and always open (see the top of the list). It’s a cliché to ask how we ever managed without it, but…however did we manage without it?

We are told that human wants are limitless, and that is clearly true in areas such as personal services. If cost were no object, I’m sure we would all give consideration to employing assorted Jeeves and Mrs Bridges characters to make our living easier. The same would be true for personal trainers, manicurists, dog walkers and the rest.

Property, too, could be seen in this light. Were, again, money no object, both in terms of acquiring property and of maintaining it, very many people would happily buy weekend cottages (if they lived in London) or pieds-a-terre in London (if they lived in the country).

But I can’t help thinking the outlook for consumer goods is rather cloudier. No, this is not another claim that we have reached “peak stuff” (when are we going to reach peak peak?) and that the younger generation is turning its back on accumulation and happily renting items such as clothes rather than buying them.

The American writer Alvin Toffler (1928-2016) predicted that people would, in the near future, rent almost everything, shunning the idea of ownership, in his book Future Shock – which was published in 1970.

Rather, I suggest that many of us are happy with much of what we have, perhaps not in the rather extreme sense in which I still marvel at the likes of mains electricity, but certainly in terms of showing little interest in 5G mobile phones, or hologram-style TV sets or “wearable tech”, not because they are rejecting post-industrial society (or whatever) but simply because they are…not interested.

Saturday miscellany

THE police have certainly been taking some stick in recent weeks. Matthew Parris gave them a bravura duffing up in The Times on November 3: “The biggest underlying thing wrong with Britain's police is that they aren't any good.” Any doubts about his analysis vanished on November 5, when the paper published a letter from Lord Blair, former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, taking issue with the article. Wrote Lord Blair: “The police service is called when things have already gone wrong: that most of the time they make things better is a triumph.”

Putting to one side whether they really do “make things better” (presumably arresting householders who have dared to defend themselves does not fall into this category?), that things have “already gone wrong” tells you everything you need to know about the invisibility of the force until it’s too late.

Anyway, that’s not really my point. Instead, I’d like to ask how the current frustrations with a force whose priorities frequently seem utterly divorced from those of the public fits with the oft-repeated insistence, with which I have been regaled for most of my life, that all the problems with Britain’s State schools would disappear if only everyone had to use them, because “middle class parents” would demand, and get, higher standards.

The experience of the middle class with the police suggests that a monopoly isn’t necessarily the best way to raise the standards of a public service.

Elsewhere in the realm of public services, it seems our tragically-underfunded (i.e. grotesquely over-funded) BBC is going back on its deal with Dave "The Cave" Cameron on funding old people's TV licences. If the BBC, under its director-general Tony Hall, is looking for savings, why not automate Lord Hall (current salary apparently knocking on half a million pounds)? It can't be hard to devise two pieces of software, one that will deny any suggestion of bias at the BBC and the other that will "let it be known", whenever a plumb job comes up, that the (now virtual) Lord Hall would "like to see it go to a woman"?

PPS

THIS YouTube video, filmed from the driver’s cab, shows the progress of a cross-Pennine train from Manchester Piccadilly to Hull Paragon Interchange. I found it incredibly relaxing.